27 year old Porsche McGregor-Sims died one day after getting diagnosed with cervical cancer. But she had complained for months to doctors about abdominal pain. But they wrote it off as "hormonal".
In December of 2019, she told her primary care physician about the abdominal pain and severe bleeding. They referred her to a gynecologist a month later, according to Solent News.
The aspiring UK actress and model was told by the gynecologist that further examination wouldn't be needed. Since she had recently gone off birth control pills, she was told it was just her system going through the shock of the change.
By April of 2020, she was dead. That was one day after learning she had an aggressive form of cervical cancer. The doctor had missed it.
There have been growing concerns in medicine that symptoms of women are too often dismissed as mental or hormonal.
The gynecologist, Peter Schlesinger, told Solent, “If someone was in the room with me I probably would have done [more]. But we are all here today with the benefit of hindsight." Some have speculated that her visit may have been rushed because of the business of the holidays.
Porsche's mother said in a statement, “You didn’t do the most basic thing — give her an internal examination … one of the most simple and fundamental ways to assess someone for cervical cancer. She also claimed her daughter's doctor focused too much on her IBS adding “and that just didn’t make sense to me.”